War!
Who profits? Who Pays? Who Dies?
Lies! Lies! Lies!
And it is we who are paying for this carnage.
We who obediently submit our tax dollars, year after bloody year as the pentagon budget swells and our communities crumble.
It is we who consume and consume and consume, our gluttony seeming to have no bounds, as global corporations enslave the workers to meet our demands.
How long are we willing to pay for these wars?
Funds are robbed from the most vulnerable among us, from the education of our children, the preservation of our soil, our air, our water. The entire web of life is poisoned.
How long are we willing to pay for these wars?
We are told that the brave men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan are fighting to protect our way of life. For God’s sake, bring them home. Our way of life must change, it is insupportable, and dead wrong.
We who gather here today must know by now that it is not enough to change the face of the presidency. We must realize by now that our choices at the ballot box are limited, that election fraud is rampant, that the systems of oppression are gearing up with terrifying speed to stifle dissent and to assure our continued obedient submission to the global corporate military power structure.
How long are we willing to pay for these wars?
Starhawk has written that : “it is up to us to put our bodies on the line to physically prevent the war machine from operating . We're here and- we're the only ones who can reach the gears and levers.” And we are the ones who hold the purse strings. Remember this on April 15th.
How long are we willing to pay for these wars?
The Pentagon and media are aligned in their efforts to hide the costs: the maimed soldiers, the battlefield carnage, the grieving widows, the broken souls, the poisoned earth.
How long are we willing to pay for these wars?
Each time I raise my voice against the wanton, reckless squander of the lives of the willing and unwilling soldiers, and the non-combatants, whose deaths the Pentagon refuses to even count;
Each time I cry out against the annihilation of the whole fabric of fragile, precious, irreplaceable life;
Each time I say No to War, I think of my brothers, Daniel and Thomas. One followed the other into the Marines and one after the other they returned from Viet Nam, broken in body and spirit—Agent Orange coursing through their systems.
Nothing could have prepared them for the callous betrayal. They were utterly changed. And one after the tormented other they died.
Today, it is another generation of Americans whose lives are on the line. Another generation whose noble ideals, exploited by military trainers, will be used up in the service of death. Another generation killed or maimed then abandoned by a government that has broken faith with its noble principles, a government that fails to protect its citizens—a U.S. regime that threatens the world with the use of weapons of mass destruction.
Militarism is killing us. And the truth is: We are all responsible. It is crushing the world, defiling the good earth, targeting not the dangerous leaders who we have armed and financed, but the women and children, the old and infirm, as well as the soldiers.
How long are we willing to pay for these wars?
Thomas Paine understood it as “the duty of a Patriot to protect her country from her government."
It is our duty also to demand the truth from this government, and this unwise, un-elected president, and the Congress who too quickly relinquished power to this dangerous son of a Bush.
We will support our soldiers best when we raise loud and continued objections to this theft of their futures. We will support our country best when we reclaim it from the tyranny of corporate greed and militarism.
How long will we continue to pay for this war?
More and more voices against war are the voices of those who have known war, who have seen the horror, who have felt the betrayal, who have survived the soul-searing realities of a battlefield and who have come back to tell the truth. I applaud and honor the courage of the Veterans for Peace who stand here today. The courage of those who refuse to register for the military, and those who speak out against this war from within the very belly of this insatiable beast. If we really want an end to war. If we really want peace to prevail, if we really believe in a world without war, we must be willing to take personal risks at least as great as those we ask of our young men and women in the armed forces.
Are we willing to collectively bear the sometimes harsh consequences of speaking truth to power before another generation is lost on the fields of slaughter? Are we willing to risk economic security? our personal liberty? Or even some small portion of our considerable privilege to obstruct this business of death?
Lies! Lies! Lies!
Who Profits? Who Pays? Who Dies?
© By Clare Hanrahan